day by day.

Because time spent here with the blog will be infrequent in the upcoming weeks (and months, and...), it didn't feel right to just stop without warning, at least for my own demarcation-needing self.

Photos have dwindled in the past months, recording life has gone by the wayside, and I'm finding myself in a situation where we are simply figuring out how to get through each day at a time, working out what it means to be homeschooling a, um, strong-willed young teenager trying to find her place in the world, and a patient and curious but still young and needy gradeschooler with her own problems to fight. 
(And I can't even talk about the weather without simple numbing fatigue.  I am not prepared, in body, mind, or spirit, for four months solid of "mid-January," which is where we've been for going-on-two weeks straight - temps high in the teens when it should be upper 30's.)

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Just shooting photos around the house makes me miss doing it, and having only a handful of pictures saved in the monthly file is sad, so hopefully I will be able to keep up more than I think I can, but I also very much can't feel like I need to do anything extra.  It's time to keep taking care of our little family.

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Notes:  K is a smart, mostly-happy, almost teen who loves talking with her friends on e-mail and playing "minetest."  She still loves drawing and the 11th Doctor, has an incredible imagination, likes playing basketball, loves watching movies, and continues to read dozens of books a week.  She puts up with our homeschooling even though she's smarter than she should be.  (She puts up with math lessons because she's really a geek at heart.)  Gret loves knitting and sewing and doing things with her hands, drawing, math, science, and This Old House magazine and watching Love-it-or-List-it on Netflix with me when K is at basketball practice with Dad.  Oh, and "minetest," too!  (She puts up with reading because she lives in a house with more than eleven large full bookcases and doesn't have much choice.)  There!  Do I have to write a Christmas letter now?

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So, finally, don't call this goodbye;  just, you know:  see-you-sooner-or-later.

Where spring tries its best.

(when the girls get a hold of the camera:)

The quagmire we traverse on the way to the garage:

Same, two hours later:

Three days later:

Though she waited until the last minute to design and build her car, Kaatje had a lot of fun participating in her first pinewood derby.  Jeff and the girls had a big day out here and there, while a little group of us from church attended a women's conference in Iowa.  I came home to pizza and a tired family, tired myself, but we all had fun.  Both years, I "didn't bother" to bring my camera to the conference, which is adjacent to a state park, and both years I regretted not having it.  (In thousands of miles run over my years of running, I'd never seen a deer skeleton before!!  Where's a camera when you need one?!  Yes, yes, on the phone I don't have, I know.)

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The "sick tray" is back out by the couch, but the user is at art class, thankfully.  I blame the small girl's frequent sickness this year on this weather:  it hasn't been record-breaking, except in the relentlessness and persistence of the chill, perhaps.  Sunday was the warmest day since November, at 51 degrees, but I should have had the girls wear boots for our between-church-services walk to the park... the ground is frozen, insulated by still-a-foot of snow pack.  Old-wives would say her walk home from the park in damp frozen shoes is why she's sick today, add that to exposure to a virus somewhere, and I'll agree.

Even so, we're humming along this cold spring;  fun little and bigger things planned, stacks of books from the library, a new dress cut out for the small girl which could maybe be finished for Easter, even ideas starting to brew for months from now.  For now, the sun is shining (even if it's not above freezing) and we have a quiet afternoon to enjoy.

glimpses of growing and learning.

Our tubing evening didn't happen, partially due to bad head colds but mostly due to the hill closing a week before Jeff thought it was going to close.  We're not sure why it's taken us this long to utilize the little ski/snowboard/tubing hill near us, but when Kaatje started asking for snowboarding lessons around Christmas time, we knew where to look.  Lessons one and two went great... lesson three's backside turn practice led to a painful wrist sprain.  Ah well, she's already asking for lessons next year, and we've already marked it on the calendar.

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A huge horray for homeschooling in our lives:  we made the trek to our local homeschooling store (how many people can say that?!  we're very blessed.) and Kaatje and I chatted with the invaluably helpful owners about the "math issues" we were having.  Now we're happily using new curriculum where I'm remembering statistics and proof theory from college, and Kaatje's learning mice can't read.  (Partially kidding, she's learning more than that, too.)  My math major heart loves that she's happily learning set unions, and her math-is-stupid (not hard, just stupid) heart loves that she's not doing repetitive long division problems.  If you're a homeschooler with a voracious reader who finds typical math hair-tearing-out-boring, check out Life of Fred.  The pure greatness of homeschooling is that this might not even be the end-all... I might come back later saying how Fred's not working anymore and we've made another change, but where I was at the end of my rope before (and so was Kaatje), we're once again contentedly remembering why we do this.  Must always keep in mind that the best way to move forward sometimes is to talk to those wonderful homeschool pioneers around us, from the friends at church with highschoolers to the now-grandparents of another generation of to-be-homeschooled kids.  Our girls' learning won't look anything like anyone else's, and the ones who know that best and can help us grow are the ones who've already been there!

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Lots on the needles lately;  since our LYS closed (*sniff*) I picked out some yarn on their closing day to make the girls whatever they wanted.  Greta picked a short-sleeve cardigan in bright pink wool (Ravelry here), Kaatje a hat in greens and browns (same pattern as this one).  In a fit of cold late winter knitting, both are finished except for the fox ears Kaatje wants on her hat... need to research those a bit.  I'm forever working on a shawl out of some gorgeous soft and so very splitty rowan cotton/silk, from the market in Ireland.  Splitty means despite an easy pattern, I have to watch what I'm doing:  sad for movie watching, fine for piano lessons and car rides. 

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Despite snow in the forecast, the paper flakes have been peeled from the windows.  I don't seem to be able to come out of the little chain speciality grocery store without another plant, somehow a shamrock has been added in the window.  (I'm a sucker for anything that says "full sun;"  until the leaves appear, our huge south widows will kill lesser plants.)  Snow covers most of the ground still, grimy and gritty, but I've been watching the garden plants slowly be revealed.  No garden plans yet, just some spindly tall basil whose seeds Gret and I threw in a pot a while ago, pampered in our funny little greenhouse.  Nothing like the smell of basil as the first day of spring approaches.

twelve years old, and early evening sun.

Our deep winter is highlighted by birthdays, for three weeks the girls are three years apart, which they find amusing.  The hardest part?  Little one gets fun things first, and big one has to wait.  I think this year she'd say it was worth it.  A much wanted building block set was received, along with a yearned-for video game, and even some cold hard cash (a highlight! ...saving for new game systems is hard.)  Much to my relief, baked alaska was easy, with yolks left over for ice cream, which is always nice.  Leftovers even froze well, which had worried me.

So we settle in for the final waiting, watching for the season to turn, week by week.  The weather, the snow outside, don't betray any change yet, but the sun says otherwise as I sit at 5:00 pm and the sky is still bright.  I know there's many weeks of snow left, and melt and new storms and cold, but we went outside the other day... and we could smell... not the frozen sharp smell of below zero, but the wintery smell of snow and ice and sleeping trees.  (and exhaust.  We're pretty desperate when we happily point out we can smell car exhaust!)  We snuggle in in the evenings in our "new" movie room (photos to come!), let the girls pick out what Olympic events they want watch from our vast recordings, and know just like the green grass and 50's in Sochi, we'll be there soon, too. 

(Random:  Sochi is 1.5 degrees latitude further south than we are.  Aside:  we don't have palm trees.  But then again, we don't have mountains, either.)

(best $18 I've "wasted" this winter)

Kaatje was bored one afternoon (I think it was a Saturday Jeff and I were trying to work to finish something specific) so I handed her my camera, the SLR.  I showed her how it works, set the macro zoom to manual, and pointed her to the flower basket I had picked up a week earlier from our member-only-big-box store.  (The dog was sleeping on the couch nearby.)  This flower basket delights us with its variety!....and smell.  Phew, hyacinths!

Today is Kaatje's 12th birthday, but we're celebrating tomorrow.  We were busy during the day and the evening with regular things, so tomorrow we can make a more special day.  So after posting her pictures here late this evening, a breath of spring on these still-cold cold days, snow to our knees, I think it's time to find some birthday fun to plan...  (The cake and ice cream is prepped for Baked Alaska, waiting in the freezer.)